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awk | Cheatsheet

AWK is an interpreted programming language that is generally used to make shell scripts more powerful and feature-rich. It is mostly used to process data in text and file operations.

The name comes from the first letter of the surname of each of the creators: Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan.

This language is considered by many to be an important milestone in the history of programming, having had a great influence on the creation of other programming languages, such as Perl and Python.


Execute 4 commands at every second

time awk '{
  buffer = buffer $0 ORS       # Store the current line in a buffer
  count++                      # Increment the counter

  if (count % 4 == 0) {        # When the counter reaches 4
    print buffer               # Output the buffered lines
    buffer = ""                # Reset the buffer
  }
}
END {
  if (buffer != "")            # Output any remaining lines
    print buffer
}' 100.rader.txt